A, or 

a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO

basic Latin alphabet.[1][2] Its name in English is a (pronounced /ˈeɪ/), plural aes.[nb 1] It is similar in
shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives.[3] The uppercase version consists
of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase
version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is
commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by
children, and is also found in italic type.

The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician
alphabet,[4] which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to
distinguish it from a true alphabet). In turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of
an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script[5] influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular
head with two horns extended

When the ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for a letter to represent
the glottal stop—the consonant sound that the letter denoted in Phoenician and
other Semitic languages, and that was the first phoneme of the Phoenician pronunciation
of the letter—so they used their version of the sign to represent the vowel /a/, and called
it by the similar name of alpha. In the earliest Greek inscriptions after the Greek Dark
Ages, dating to the 8th century BC, the letter rests upon its side, but in the Greek
alphabet of later times it generally resembles the modern capital letter, although many
local varieties can be distinguished by the shortening of one leg, or by the angle at
which the cross line is set.
The Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and
left the letter unchanged. The Romans later adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write
the Latin language, and the resulting letter was preserved in the Latin alphabet that would
come to be used to write many languages, including English.